Professor Quits in Probe of Gun Book

Robert Stacy McCain THE WASHINGTON TIMESPublished 10/28/2002

Michael Bellesiles, the history professor who
wrote that firearms were rare in early America, has resigned from
Atlanta's Emory University after an investigation found he "willingly
misrepresented the evidence" in his award-winning book.

Robert
A. Paul, interim dean of Emory College, announced that Mr. Bellesiles
would resign effective Dec. 31 after 14 years at Emory, and said the
university considers "authoritative" an investigative committee's
report about charges of research misconduct against Mr. Bellesiles

The three-person committee — composed of scholars from
Princeton University, Harvard University and the University of Chicago
— found that Mr. Bellesiles' work showed "evidence of falsification,"
"egregious misrepresentation" and "exaggeration of data."

"[H]is
scholarly integrity is seriously in question," the committee concluded
in its 40-page report.

Published two years ago, Mr.
Bellesiles' book, "Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun
Culture," garnered praise from gun-control advocates, won the
prestigious Bancroft Award and was fiercely criticized by scholars who
accused Mr. Bellesiles of misrepresenting or even fabricating evidence.

In February, Emory appointed the committee to investigate the
charges, and its report — released by the university when it announced
Mr. Bellesiles' resignation Friday — found the tenured professor
"guilty of unprofessional and misleading work."

Much
of Mr. Bellesiles' argument in "Arming America" hinged on probate
records — 18th- and 19th-century wills that might list firearms owned
by the deceased.

"Every aspect of his work in the
probate records is deeply flawed," the committee concluded, finding
that Mr. Bellesiles "appears not to have been systematic in selecting
repositories or collections of probate records for examination, and his
recording methods were at best primitive and altogether unsystematic."

In a statement released Friday, Mr. Bellesiles defended his
book, refused to concede wrongdoing and criticized Emory's inquiry as
"just plain unfair" for focusing on "one small part" of "Arming
America."

"I believe that if we begin investigating
every scholar who challenges received truth, it will not be long before
no challenging scholarly books are published," Mr. Bellesiles said,
saying he was leaving Emory because he could not "continue to teach in
what I feel is a hostile environment."

In his
seven-page statement, Mr. Bellesiles said the probe of his book "has
actually obscured a much more important consideration of the main
issues raised by 'Arming America.'"

"Arming
America" contradicted previous historical scholarship by saying that
Americans in the colonial era and early 1800s had few guns — and that
common beliefs about armed farmers and frontiersman were myths.

The book made Mr. Bellesiles a
hero to gun-control advocates who praised him for "debunk[ing] the
mythology propagated by the gun lobby."

"Arming
America" was praised for its use of probate records, which The
Washington Post called the author's "freshest and most interesting
source."

But scholars, including professor James
Lindgren of Northwestern University, examined the data in "Arming
America" and found it did not match the probate records. While other
critics said Mr. Bellesiles had incorrectly cited early laws regarding
militias or misinterpreted first-hand narratives about gun ownership in
early America, it was his use of probate data that was the focus of the
Emory investigation.

The committee's report,
written by professors Stanley Katz of Princeton, Hanna Gray of Chicago
and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich of Harvard, found Mr. Bellesiles guilty of
"sloppy scholarship," using "randomly gathered information" and
"unsystematic research" in reporting data from Vermont probate records.

One of the most serious accusations was that Mr. Bellesiles
had fabricated data for California in cases where the records had been
destroyed by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Mr. Bellesiles later
said that he meant to cite Contra Costa County documents that were not
destroyed.

The committee wrote that it "cannot
prove that Professor Bellesiles simply invented his California
research," but that "neither do we have confidence that the Contra
Costa inventories resolve the problem."

The most
damaging of the committee's findings related to the book's "Table One,"
a chart about colonial gun ownership in which Mr. Bellesiles excluded
data from another scholar's study of the subject.

"If
Professor Bellesiles silently excluded data from the years 1774-1776,
as he asserts, precisely because they failed to show low numbers of
guns, he has willingly misrepresented the evidence," the report said,
adding that similar problems "suggest that there is a real discrepancy
between the research Professor Bellesiles did and his presentation of
that research in Table One."

Mr. Bellesiles'
responses to the charges of research misconduct were "confusing,
evasive and occasionally contradictory," the committee said.

The
committee's report was completed in July, but its publication was
withheld while Mr. Bellesiles filed an appeal.

In
May, the National Endowment for the Humanities asked that its name be
removed from a research fellowship Mr. Bellesiles had received and
which he is using to conduct research for his next book at the Newberry
Library in Chicago.